My father, my coach

Aiden Chang doesn’t play like a typical sophomore. The Aquin guard leads the team in scoring and has aided the Bulldogs to their third straight regional championship.

By Joey Baskerville

Journal Standard

By Joey Baskerville

Posted Feb. 26, 2013 at 12:01 AM

By Joey Baskerville

Posted Feb. 26, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Freeport, Ill.

Aiden Chang doesn’t play like a typical sophomore.
The Aquin guard leads the team in scoring and has aided the Bulldogs to their third straight regional championship.

Chang has played through the pressure of being a consistent scorer on the No. 2 ranked team in Class 1A with relative ease, almost as though he doesn’t feel it or just brushes it off.
“Honestly, there’s pressure,” he said, “But anyone on our team can score at any time. Andrew Martin just scored 25 or something like that last week (against Dakota). So that takes my mind off it so I can just play.”
The pressure he can’t ignore is being the coach’s son. And that’s what ultimately drives him.
“I told always told him growing up,” Aquin coach Rich Chang said, “when you’re the coach’s son, you’ve got to run extra hard, you have to hustle and dive farther for a loose ball.
“If I’m your father and your coach, that’s what I’m going to be expecting. He grew up with that expectation, and for the most part he’s responded.”

Separating roles

Rich tries to separate the roles of father and coach on and off the court and Aiden doesn’t call him “Dad” at practice, but the on- and off-court relationships can’t help but be intertwined.
“He’ll ask me if I’ve watched film at home,” Aiden said. “I’ve been struggling from the free-throw line lately, so he wants me to watch to see what I’m doing wrong.
“He still coaches even at home. It’s a 24-hour job.”
Rich Chang, who was a consultant in his previous career in Chicago before becoming the coach at his alma mater in 2006, has always been there to push Aiden.
“I’ve coached Aiden for a long time,” Rich said. “Even back to when we lived in the Chicago area in basketball and baseball.”
Aiden admitted there has been a time or two when he felt his dad-as-coach pushed too hard.
“Sometimes I feel like he goes over, but I know he’s doing it for a good purpose to make me better,” he said.

Rich said he recognized last season he needed to ease up on Aiden as a freshman.
“I might have been too hard on him for his mental maturity to handle,” Rich said. “I think he’s grown a lot mentally since last year.”
This season, Aiden is averaging 14.9 points and is shooting a team-best 51.6 percent from the field.

Different games, same personality

Rich Chang is a few inches shorter than his son, though both play guard.
Aiden, listed at 6-foot-1, likely would have been a forward back when Rich played in the 1980s.
“He’s a better player and finisher than I was,” coach Chang said. “I was more of a speed guy who pushed the ball down the court and distributed. I’d shoot from the outside every once and a while.
“Back when I played, they didn’t have the 3-point line, so if you shot that far out, you’d be sitting next to the coach. The game’s changed, the players have changed and we’re not similar players.”
Rich and Aiden do share similar speech patterns and a fiery, competitive spirit — one that can sometimes get themselves in trouble on the court.
In Pearl City, Aiden received a technical foul during a heated battle between the Bulldogs and Wolves.
“It’s one of the few times that I’ve gotten yelled at for talking to a ref and I wasn’t even directing it at the ref,” Aiden said. “I was kind of mad at myself and frustrated. He told me: ‘It’s a hostile environment’ and ‘don’t talk’ before the game. ‘That’s why you have to listen to me.’
“It was a really teachable moment.”’
Rich was visibly upset with Aiden over the tech, but didn’t appear too pleased with the calls either during a physical contest either.
“There’s times when my emotions take over and that’s a teachable moment too,” Rich said. “It’s one of those ‘do as I say, not as I do’ teachable moments.”
Family affair

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Aiden, along with his twin sister, Haley, and older sister, Aubrey, have played basketball since they were small children. The love of the game for all three grew from there.
“Aiden and his two sisters and I used to play 21 and horse all the time,” Rich said. “There was always a hoop at our house back in Chicago and here. Growing up that was just apart of their life.
“We treated it (basketball) as family time and there was no coaching going on at that time. Maybe that’s where it came from.”
Aubrey graduated last year and started on the 2012 girls basketball team that won the Class 1A state title. Haley has started both years for a team that won its’ second consecutive state title last weekend.
Aiden will play in his second sectional and will be starting in his first semifinal game Wednesday. Aquin hasn’t won a sectional boys title in 30 years.
“We’ve been so close the last two years, we’ve been minutes away,” Aiden said. “It’s been such a long time, and plus with the girls winning downstate, we’re trying to match that, which is hard to do.”
One on one

With so much talent in the family, one has to wonder who would win in a game of one on one.

“I think I would,” Aiden said.
For Rich, that competition ended a while ago.
“I realized about two years ago it was probably time for me to stop,” he said. “I’m going to say because of my age.”
And while Aiden is the older sibling over Haley by seven minutes, he isn’t interested in a one on one with his two-time state champion sister.
“I don’t feel the need to,” Aiden said, “especially now that even if I beat her, she’d just throw up two fingers.”